Comment by wholinator2
10 hours ago
I agree wholeheartedly! This is exactly what i was thinking the entire time. Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in? Will the 0.5% uptick in toner cost for the year cause the administration to rethink their requirements? He's just taken the immense weight and pain he holds for this process, undeservedly, and placed it upon another undeserving person, then laughed at her anguish.
Yes, life is hard, but surely we can bear our troubles in a way that don't make others harder to bear. Or at least aim your troubles at someone who has any power at all to change things! Find a better way to fight the system, that isn't just stabbing other people trapped in the box with you
I see this type of an argumentation very often and I strongly disagree.
You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended.
I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.
From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Moreover, consider what happens if your argument convinces too many people: malevolent actors can just wall themselves with "innocent" people and get away with pretty much anything.
I find it far more effective to make friends with and be kind to that employee, and then describe how I know it isn't their fault but this one aspect of the thing that their company does really sucks, right? They're then able to carry that specific complaint from one of their best customers up the chain.
There are a thousand reasons why someone might be miserable, might resign or ask for a raise, but at the next monthly meeting or whatever opportunity they have for receiving suggestions, an employee who actually likes you will be more likely to speak up and get something done.
This has worked for me at least in the B2B space, where I'm affecting one of 50 state applications engineers or something like that. I'm aware that this isn't exactly the same as the federal government that employs like 3 million people, but the principle is the same.
If you got on Karen's good side, she might grouse with you that sending and receiving faxes is archaic, that mail is slow, agree that printed paper's not that accommodating to blind people, and acknowledge that it's cruel and wasteful to ask people to prove their chronic, incurable disabilities every year under threat of taking away their benefits through these platforms. You could work together and laugh about how funny it would be to communicate the real costs and hardships with her supervisors if you literally faxed 1,200 pages of a PDF, wearing through multiple toner cartridges and reams of paper, generating a box that she could drop on the table with a "thud" to emphasize that they should stop doing that.
That might create change, especially if it happens for multiple employees multiple times a day.
Making a bureaucrat miserable because they have a lot of paperwork to do is not going to create change.
Indeed, if you're nice they might take your side. If you're an asshole, that's a lot less likely.
> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
These huge businesses and huge governments are too big for one person at the bottom of the totem pole to make a difference. Sure, they may share 1/N of the culpability for what their organization is doing, but if they rage quit, they will be immediately replaced with another body. The organization won't even notice it.
Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.
Until one day... Afroman releases a new album.
So what is the argument here? That it is irrelevant because there is no critical mass?
Do you think the French revolution happened in isolation?
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> One wallet changes nothing.
Once again, this is something I hear often and I strongly disagree. I'm lucky to be born into western civilization with the paradigm to respect the power of an individual. It seems to me it is eastern influence to speak in this dismissive way about individual actions. "No one is irreplaceable" is another common phrase. Someone says he decides to leave a community, and there's inevitably someone saying "goodbye!" with some equivalent of a mocking smirk.
I'm also lucky to have affected stuff myself in the past, e.g. I caused local government (~10 000 residents) to change. Actions of an individual very often do matter. It's just unfortunate we often don't get any feedback for our actions and it seems like they don't matter which demotivates people from any form of activism and puts them in this depressive, hopeless state of mind. Imagine how beautiful the world would have been if you had some kind of a debugging tool to inspect how your actions affected others, with a side by side comparison of your universe and some alternative universe where you haven't taken an action. This is also why I try to give feedback to people, send thanks to authors of free libraries etc.
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Eh, it has an impact. It's not always obvious but it adds up over time. Use your analogy of choice: slowly building up pressure until it boils over or a small pebble starting an avalanche or whatever works for you.
I don't necessarily agree with the OPs approach. He could have filed a complaint or done any number of things that may have been better. But in the heat of the moment nobody is making perfectly rational decisions.
Regardless, we need to fight back against abusive systems on the big and on the small. We won't always get it right but the act of fighting is what matters.
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Then I'm guessing you don't vote, right? Because one vote makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.
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How's Target doing? Zero impact?
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> This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
It's not flawed at all. If the last five years have taught ideologues at Disney and in the video game industry anything, it's that you can waste hundreds of millions on ideology-drenched projects and get, say, 1000 concurrent players as your peak.
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> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
No, all you're accomplishing is being an ass to that person. They're a replaceable cog in a machine. And often their role as just as much to be a punching bag for assholes like you, to take the hits instead of who's really responsible, than whatever other business function they're performing. The people responsible aren't idiots, they know what they're going.
The only thing being an ass to someone who's just a cog accomplishes is making yourself into an asshole.
Absolutely agree. Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans. They need to get bitten sometimes.
> Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans.
Do you have a citation for that or is that just an idea of a villain you've invented in your head? Karen doesn't hold any power whatsoever over anyone. Karen is a low level employee who has to answer the phones all day. She doesn't decide who gets benefits or not. She didn't create the Continuing Disability Review. She didn't create the security policy that said they should refuse to open PDF attachments from random people who email them. She doesn't need to "get bitten" any more than you do.
If you're trying to effect actual change that seems like a great way to harden the people you need to be influencing against you.
> I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.
If you're talking about Matthew 10, I think you read that bible passage exactly backward. Jesus was saying not to worry about any persecution caused by following him, because the responsibility is not yours. They are really persecuting him, "the master", and if you just keep doing what he says you will come out on top, even if you are killed, and they will get theirs in the end.
(Not that I agree. As an atheist, it feels coercive. But that's clearly what Matthew 10 is saying)
> if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Perhaps, but the question to ask is not “how to apply some pressure” but “how to apply pressure in the place where it’s most effective.
No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
And also, they are not supposed to use their intuitive ideas about what is and what is not dangerous use of software. When they do use their intuitive ideas, hacks happen. Karen here doing what she was told and accepting only formats that her organization security team told her to do is Karen doing the correct thing.
We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us. And we are all paid way more then Karen, but are the first to call Karen an idiot when the hack happens. Karen does not know why pdf is different from doc or whatever. Nor is she required to know.
>No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
Yes, but a boss being unable to receive a fax because the machine is "otherwise occupied" may do that.
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> We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us.
I don’t think that is true. Rules that you have to use a fax machine are enshrined in outdated laws. No IT professional is going to say to use a fax machine for security.
The same thing is true for a lot of security practices. Our company had silly password rotation policies because of certification requirements, not because our IT team thought it was necessary.
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Disagree. Employees need to be responsible and make their voices heard. The whole thing was justified. We enable nightmares with our acquiescence.
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>No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
I disagree. I'm sorry Karen here needs to bear the brunt, but if this kept up, at some point Karen's boss will take notice, And then it moves up the chain to someone who can affect that policy.
Companies purposefully set us up to communicate bottom-up, so we can either play the game or break the law.
>People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us
No, it'd be a policy maker or CEO who thinks we're in the 90's and that secure email documentation isn't a thing. "We" could suggest so many ways to handle it that would save costs while being more secure. We're not much higher on the totem pole than Karen.
Yet suddenly, we get these incidents and our bosses are suddenly rushing to IT to find a solution. As if 6 months of deliberation wasn't enough.
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This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.
> This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.
Have you heard of pig butchering? Sometimes the "scammer" you're talking to is practically a slave that will be beaten if they don't hit their numbers: https://www.wired.com/story/the-red-bull-leaks/.
Immoral assholes can out-immoral you.
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The Bible of course also says "if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee", which is where I thought you were going with this at first. The Bible says a lot of things.
It's tricky, because _sometimes_ they do. And the system doesn't give you guidance on whether you're talking to someone who (officially or not) can change the process. So, based mostly on our personality, we all push a different amount before giving up.
Relatable example: I needed to schedule a Pediatric appointment, her assigned Dr was on vacation, and the first receptionist stonewalled on switching Drs within the practice. The second one did it in 2m on her side and guided me to updating insurance in 2m on my side.
Another similar example: Since it's tax time, I had to call a us gov office with a question. The first rep claimed "their system was down" and couldn't help me. I hung up and called back. The second rep was just nasty and stonewalled me by inundating me with security questions and refusing to "verify" my identity, so I eventually hung up and called back a third time. The third rep answered my question within a few minutes, and was a thorough pleasure to deal with.
I mean, I get that these guys might not be getting paid, with the government shutdown tomfoolery, but come on!
As an alternate framing, with the paperwork be giving her what she needs to go to her boss and escalate, and their boss as needed - the paperwork as a magic ticket for everyone to advocate. To qualify that, the fax is a limited resource, and I'd be concerned about how what other things the fax might be needed for to help other people in a timely manner...
Perhaps the fax-related expenses would be the magic ticket their boss needed to justify security scanning of emails with PDFs. I just listened to Trump brag for ten minutes about replacing the thousand-dollar signing pens.
The post is tagged non-fiction, but it ignores the option to "Complete your Disabilty Update Report Online (https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-cdrs-ussi.htm), which I found after following the link in the first sentence.
The form is an embedded iFrame from "Adobe Acrobat Sign", supposedly pure Javascript . It would be a bigger story if this form were not accessible to the disabled.
The form includes a place to attach two PDF, text, or image formats. "Attachments are limited to 5MB and 25 pages".
A couple of possibilities spring to mind. Likelier that Karen lied, but maybe the 512 page fax changed the system.
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Other responders have replied well, so I will offer a slight augmentation: Yes, this is bad outcome for the bureaucrat, through no mistake of her own. A wrong has been committed against her - but not by the author - by her employer, and the system which employs her and sets these regulations. They cannot (Although they will if asked) claim ignorance or innocence: It is their fault alone for this experience.
They attacked a fax machine, I don't think it has feelings. The woman will get over her frustration at seeing it print for two hours.
I also been on the customer service side and it's really annoying getting angry persona after angry person trying to push their frustrations on you for something you have no control.
Oh, me too. I started out as tech support for a dial up ISP in the 90s. It was rough. I am always polite to customer service. I just feel like it wasn't the lady that was attacked so much as it was the fax machine, the policy, the institution. She had some frustration, but it sounds like he was even polite to her, Didn't yell, didn't call her names or anything. He just opted for malicious compliance.
You have me thinking about old customer service war stories now, I wanted to share one of the more ridiculous ones. A tornado came through the small town and knocked out the utility lines. Being a dial-up ISP our infrastructure was a bit messed up for a few days. Once it was all squared away we had an angry customer call and yell at us about how we were offline for a few days and how unprofessional it was to not let him know that we were going offline. That he wasn't so much mad we were offline but we should have told him so he could have planned around it. He was yelling so much. I finally just said "sir, next time we schedule a tornado I will be sure to let you know." and he accepted the answer and thanked me. People are so odd.
In this case the problem can't easily be blamed on "the system". Government benefits are this way because politicians have for years blamed "benefit cheats" and "welfare queens" and other boogymen, people have voted based on this, and now the law is you have to prove you're still congenitally blind every year. The system is working, it's actually doing what the politicians and their voters want.
Explain that to the Karen, then... and let her suffer, instead of the poor blind taxpayer.
He never chose to be blind. He pays his taxes. He is the customer.
She chose to be part of The System. She is paid to provide a service, within The System's rules.
I have zero empathy for her. Everything is working as intended.
Hopefully you feel about the same way about every bit of vitriol levied towards tech workers.
>then laughed at her anguish.
anguish? as in, "excruciating pain" or "agonizing torment"?
i dont understand where the "anguish" comes from. he didnt yell at her, berate her, hit her, cause her to be fired, submit a malicious complaint, or anything of the sort. he sent her a long fax. oh no!
if i was in her position, i would shrug and hand my boss the 500 pieces of paper.
if you are just a cog in the machine, it is not mentally healthy to take on the responsibility of more than a cog. caring is the responsibility of non-cogs.
edit: today i learned that sending a long fax is apparently a method of torture, causing mental anguish to the receiver. my bad. profuse apologies to anyone i have sent a longer fax to, i had no idea the mental damage i was causing. i can only hope that god will forgive my sins.
exactly this. I didn't put you in a bad job; you - and to a large extent, your society - did. you are the face of the machine that I am trying to deal with. if you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine. but if you pick up a phone to talk to a client or customer, you are a representation of an organization, and you will be treated as such. fix you mind to understand that people are trying to find the right things to say to you to get what they need at that moment. no different from someone putting in quarters to get a soda from a vending machine. I do X, I get Y. if there is a breakdown in getting Y, I will try other things beyond X. so, in this example, I tried to be reasonable; I tried to make this simple for me while simultaneously making it simple for both you and the machine you are representing. if it is the machine that prevents you from accepting that simplicity, then explain as much as they let you, apologize like a human being for the failings of the machine you represent, and ignore literally all of the rest of it. you can only do what you can do. they can only get what they can get. no amount of hostility will change the policy, but hostility will surely get different (sometimes better; not often) results than acquiescence. recognize that it's not hostility towards you and - god forbid - enjoy the fact that someone else notices how fucking shitty the machine you work for is. if you're a real superstar, take note of the specific situation and place it somewhere you can provide a collection of specific situations for review.
> if you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine
How dare someone take a job that isn’t very nice just to afford a living!
That said, everyone kind of sucks in the situation.
The Karen should have been nicer and shown more compassion instead of hitting the OP with that line about security (and maybe the whole approach should have been considered a bit more, since their requirements make it harder for disabled people to receive the support they need).
And OP perhaps maybe should have filed a complaint or something, maybe contact a news org if they’re feeling wronged, instead of being petty like that. What if someone else doesn’t receive their services in a timely manner over that bullshit? It felt more like feeling triumphant over inconveniencing someone and getting back at them in a sense.
I can’t say I don’t find that sort of thing relatable, but yeah it probably could have been handled better by everyone. I guess what I’m saying is that they shouldn’t have been subjected to the circumstance that lead to them being a jerk, but the choice to be one is on them.
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Spoken from the pretty obvious position of never having to have worked a low-wage people facing job.
Here's the real situation: the people that pick up the phone when you call them up aren't going to be paid much above minimum wage at all. They have zero institutional power to fix anything. You're yelling at people that, themselves, almost certainly are only barely making enough money to get by either.
It is worthless to yell at these people because they can't fix shit; they don't set policies, they have no power to fix things and all your yelling is going to achieve is at best counterproductive to what you want to get done (since now the front facing employee dislikes you personally and is less inclined to try and help you out) and at worst is going to get you into further trouble when you do need something routine done. (Since now you're on the list of "people that the employees don't want to put any extra effort into since they're jerks".)
There are people that get paid to be the complaints facing entity of the organization, who are paid to withstand whatever shit you can throw at them and who have an ability to fix up whatever you needed in specific. They're not the people that pick up the phone.
What you need to do is channel the inner Karen and ask to speak to the manager. The manager can help you with this sort of thing, they are the ones that can do shit to avoid sustaining the machine, because they have a career they want to grow into and risk actual consequences for pissing people off.
Be polite (but firm; you don't need to be walked over) to the first tier support employees, even if they can't help you. Save the complaints for the manager (who you shouldn't be afraid to ask to speak to either). The managers job is to deal with the real complaints, not the routine stuff that just happens to need a human involved. They are taking a job to be the face of the machine for reasons other than "I literally need a minimum wage job to survive".
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The human faces of the machine are our only hope. The alternative is, in the short term, a machine face of the machine, whom you can't argue with and who will summarily deny your benefits with no chance of appeal. In the long term, the alternative is no machine at all.
The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.
Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.
See, e.g., the case studies in https://virginia-eubanks.com/automating-inequality/.
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> if i was in her position, i would shrug and hand my boss the 500 pieces of paper.
yeah honestly. If I was in that position I'd probably think it's funny and just stick the whole stack in a folder and laugh about the dumb process.
This is exactly how it's handled from my limited dealings with the machine. Literally no one gives a shit if you make their job 'harder.' They have an endless treadmill of things to do. Whether it's your 500 page fax or 500 people with a 1 page fax is of no consequence to them. They will work at the same pace either way. In fact their boss might like it because they can try to use it to argue for more headcount which is one of the ways to gain more prestige/power for the managers.
I know the things HN hates most are analogies and anecdotes, but here's a chance to torture myself by offering one. I sat down on day at the BMV, to register a kayak. Literally everyone is my state except the wildlife enforcement officers think the whole idea is absolutely absurdly retarded. This was in a jam packed BMV with a long line. No one but one elderly lady even knew how to do it, because most people don't submit themselves to such a stupid idea as registering their kayak, even though it was required. A lady sat down with me, PECKED all the information in over a period of 15 minutes. Then showed me the form. It had the wrong hull number on it, so I told her, and she had to redo it all over again pecking it in for another 15 minutes.
After this she still got the hull number wrong. Another 15 minutes later, and she got the hull number yet again. Finally She did it again and still got the hull number wrong yet again and I just gave up and accepted the registration she gave me even though it was completely worthless to me. Not a single person at the BMV gave a single shit that this took this long nor the fact it would hold everyone up, everyone has an endless list of shit to do and there will be more waiting for them tomorrow. If it causes the machine to slow down they could not give one single fuck. They are not the least bit bothered.
> Literally no one gives a shit if you make their job 'harder.' They have an endless treadmill of things to do. Whether it's your 500 page fax or 500 people with a 1 page fax is of no consequence to them. They will work at the same pace either way.
As they should. They're in this for the long run. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
Which means all the author did was to fuck over a couple dozen other disabled people trying to navigate the process. Good job.
Were I the reader that donated them that $20, I'd issue a charge back now.
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This isn't a happy counterargument or anything, but (bad as it is) this is this person's job. Or rather it is the job. Their employer has customer service in order for it to buffer—in a cost efficient way—the one or many layers of people above this person from their (profitable) bad policies. It's a punching bag. And it's that because bad policy + punching bag is more profitable than good policy. It might even be the business/market. If the frustrating call leads to 50% of callers giving up (or not calling at all) and just paying something they might not owe, that's a nice net ROI. You might build a business around that, one that wouldn’t have the margins otherwise. You get the callers caving because they feel bad yelling at the unfortunate employees, meanwhile it's in the company's formal protocol to only correct it (or escalate the ticket to someone who could) after the customer has yelled long enough.
There are bad customers for sure, but we also cheat good customers out of what they’re owed until they’re “bad.” The customer can yell or eat the cost. I think I can both feel bad for the employee and not place much blame on the customer given customer service as a quasi profit center.
Right, shouldn't make her workday stressful, she's just following orders.
I file this under " don't be a dick, especially to the disabled". You wonder why most bankers avoid a lot of this, despite handling one of the most stressful aspect of modern humanity? It's becsuse they tend to be thr friendliest talkers out there. They know the reputation and trust of the banking system is what keeps their money in. They can be just as slimy as a used car salesman in tactics, but we're still interfacing with a human, and humans generally like to feel like they matter.
I'll admit, this is the authors bias. And we know such hackers are not the best a social cues. But taking him as his word: I can 100% visualize the kind of tone Karen made here at the author. The kind that says "I've done this 1000 times and I know how this works. I know most people won't bother. I just need to get person over with and move on". An all too familiar tone in this cold, lonely world.
I'm not going to say she deserved it. But I have no sympathy either. And sadly, this is the only legal channel we have for this without any lawyer funding. I don't see any other way to really make them listen than to reveal enough inconvenience in the real world, not in a civil matter in a townhall.
>Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in?
If there's any class of individual in whom I'm willing to place greater than average trust in their ability to read vocal tones, it's probably blind people. Just sayin'.